Authors: Shey Stahl
I had a feeling that
question went deeper than he intended.
“No―I won’t.” I
told him honestly. “I want to let loose and do everything that I never had the
guts to do back home.” I swallowed preparing myself and said what I wanted.
“And I want to lose my virginity.”
There. I said it.
He shifted next to me
but surprisingly, kept his cool. When he didn’t say anything, I continued
fearing the silence. “I just need to find someone to do it with.” I began
chewing on my fingernails in an attempt to distract myself.
Dylan blinked, his eyes
dropping to his hands and didn’t miss a beat when he replied with, “What if it
was me?”
“I would like that.”
With a bottle of whiskey and barely any
clothes, we made out the summer bucket list in the parking lot of Roger’s
Frosty of everything we intended to do to feel alive.
“Stripping…put that one
there too.”
“Stripping?” he
smirked, his eyebrow arched in question. “You’re actually going to strip? Oh
right, you already started.” The corners of his eyes crinkled in amused as he
looked at me.
“Don’t judge me, just
write.”
“I wasn’t judging you.”
Dylan grinned writing my summer bucket list on the brown paper bag from our
food. “Do I get to
wa
―?”
“I said write,” I
motioned with my hand for him to continue, my legs bouncing in the seat with
exhilaration at the possibility that right now, this summer, I could do and be
anything I wanted, “preferably with a pole.”
“Come again?”
“For stripping, a pole
for stripping,” I clarified. “Write that down.”
“Writing.”
“I want to smoke a
cigarette and get drunk and maybe steal a car.”
“You’re already working
on the
drunk
part.” He pointed out handing the whiskey
back to me. “I’m sure I could find a pole somewhere if you want to just mark
that one off now.”
The look he gave me was
almost laughable. I say almost because I was too busy trying not to mount the
boy. It was a justifiable response in my mind but then again I was trying not
to rush into this.
I took the whiskey back
looking at the label and wondering why they didn’t put a warning label on the
outside of the bottle that said:
May induce sexual behavior
.
Dylan had ways of
getting people do things he wanted and managed to convince a bum on the street
to buy us a bottle of whiskey for fifty bucks and a pack of smokes.
Now we were enjoying
that whiskey.
I wasn’t a fan of
whiskey just like I wasn’t a big fan of the beer last night. Dylan got a good
laugh at my first drink and told me his grandpa’s words of wisdom:
It’ll put
hair on your balls
.
“I don’t want hair
anywhere.” I told him completely serious and eyeing him like he was crazy for
suggesting that I needed hair on my balls. Not that I had them.
“So bare…” Dylan smiled
keeping his gaze from mine by taking another shot of whiskey, “huh.”
“I’m not even going to
answer that one.”
“I wasn’t asking. I was
imagining.”
I took the bottle from
him wondering if he was capable of a conversation that he didn’t turn sexual.
Probably not.
The whiskey burned and
tasted like shit but I enjoyed the feeling it gave me. That tingly warm feeling
was giving me the courage to talk about stripping and my virginity.
“I want to get a
tattoo.” I paused before looking over at him. My legs rested against the
dashboard as he finished writing. “And lose my virginity. Don’t forget to write
that down.”
Nodding, his smirk was
evident along with the increased breath, but he wrote my virginity at the end
of the list and tossed it on the dashboard in front of him. I looked at the bag
to see what he wrote and noticed the last one said “innocence” instead of
virginity.
“What about you?” I
asked glancing over at him. “Aren’t you going to write yours down?”
“I’m
gonna
do any goddamn thing I want to.” He told me pulling
out a cigarette and lighting it before tossing his lighter on the dash over the
bag.
I like his lips around
the end of a cigarette, and I love the way he squints his eyes when he inhales.
When he holds the smoke in his lungs and smiles, I wanted to scream.
“You’re not going to
write a list?”
“Nope, I’m going to be
spontaneous. Take my list city by city. If I want to piss alongside the road,
well then, I’m
gonna
whip it out.” His blue eyes
twinkled mischievously.
I think I fainted with
the way he said whip it out and I really wanted to be around when that
whip
it out
took place.
Drinking alcohol does
things to people besides flushed cheeks. Now I understood why it did that. It
gives you liquid confidence too. Confidence you ordinarily didn’t have, or at
least I didn’t ordinarily have it.
Somehow, and I blame
this on that whiskey, we started a game of confessions that started with me
complaining about my pinky toe that had no toenail. It was weird shaped and I
found it cute but annoying because of the way it curved I had no toenail on it.
Both feet were that way too.
Dylan smiled. “I have a
nipple ring.”
I knew that already, I
saw it earlier. “My legs are too long for my body.”
“You’re a woman, that’s
impossible. Long legs are awesome.” I took another shot and then he said, “I
have a birth mark on my ass that looks like a naked lady. I’m quite proud of it
actually.”
“I once tried to give
myself a nose ring and ended getting a bloody nose. It was a mess.”
Dylan laughed.
“My ass is too big.”
Dylan smirked. “Also
not possible,”
“It is possible to have
an ass that’s too big.”
“While I would agree it
is possible, yes, yours is perfect,” he laughed dropping his head back against
the seat looking up at the headliner. “Ah, my weakness,”
“What?”
“Your ass.” he
clarified keeping his eyes on the headliner.
I thought for a moment
pushing the bottle of whiskey back at him. Dylan took a drink straight from the
bottle just as I had done.
“Tell me about these
nipple rings.” My eyes were locked ahead of me refusing to look anywhere else.
The darkness around us was again comforting. He couldn’t see my cheeks warming
this way. “When did you get them?”
“I got them a few years
ago.” Dylan examined the bottle seeming to find the wrapper interesting just as
I had done earlier. “I was drunk and let some chick do it. Hurt like hell.”
“Can I see them?” I
finally snuck a glance at him. He was staring at me, his eyes glowing.
“Wrap those long legs
around me and I’ll show them,” he drawled out slowly, his eyelids heavy and
drooping.
Was he drunk? Or maybe
he wasn’t…
oh
…maybe he was turned on?
I’m not sure if it was
to tease me or just to be a total guy in that moment but he chuckled shifting
again and leaned slightly in my direction. His right hand slipped from the
wheel and rested on his stomach and then not so nonchalantly, he lifted his
shirt, slipped his hand down the front of his shorts and adjusted himself.
I tried not to look…but
I did. It was one of the hottest gestures I’d ever seen.
He did that on purpose.
I knew that. And to make matters worse, when he started the car right after
that, he changed the playlist on his iPod to
All Night Long
. Nothing was
said until I burst out laughing, my hands over my heated face to hide my
embarrassment and blush.
Naturally, he grinned
playing the drums with his hand on the steering wheel. Feeling the music, I
reached over to the volume and turned it up. Dylan glanced at me but said
nothing, he too, feeling the music.
A subwoofer I didn’t
know he had thumped vibrating my seat as I settled back into the comfortable
black leather.
Tossing the whiskey
bottle in the back seat, we drove about a mile down the road to a rest stop
where we decided to park for now while we tried to find a nearby hotel. We
talked about getting a tent or something for camping as that might make it
easier than finding a hotel every night but we had no set plans.
As Dylan looked on his
phone for a hotel, I listened to the lyrics and I couldn’t help but think about
what this summer would offer me. Then, my eighteen-year-old hormonal body,
thought about what all night long would mean.
I didn’t have any
experience sexually. None other than kissing and some pent us frustration. Hell,
I hadn’t even clicked my own mouse, as Mercedes would put it.
Now, with Dylan teasing
me, and the hormones surfacing, touching seemed like a good thing to try. I
once watched a YouTube video with Mercedes and another friend Jessica Long of a
porno. We talked briefly about it but out of the three of us, I was the only
one that hadn’t had sex. In fact, out of most of my friends, I was the only one
that was still a virgin.
Mercedes lost hers
sophomore year to Kasey, or so she told me, and Jessica, she had lost hers at
Homecoming to her boyfriend of the last few years Brian.
I would ask Eric at
times why we didn’t want to have sex with me and he would tell me that I was
like a treasure to him, something he wanted to keep untouched. To me it seemed
stupid and something that Elvis Presley did to his wife Priscilla to keep her
to
himself
. I tried many times to get Eric to do more
with me but he always put an end to it early on. I felt him get hard once but
that was it. Turns out, he didn’t have the desire to because he was getting it
elsewhere. It made me wonder how many times they had been together and how long
they had kept it from me. I wondered what Kasey thought of it and if Jessica
had known all along. The more my mind played over conversations we all had
together the more it made sense to me.
My thoughts twisted to
Dylan again and the attraction I was feeling for him. Maybe it was the mystery
of him or that we were alone, together, with no one to stop us but the thoughts
of him being my first was more than exciting.
While I
dreamt of things I shouldn’t have, Dylan switched playlists often never leaving
it on one particular genre for long. He seemed to have a vast variety of songs
and artists and surprisingly a lot of the same songs I had on my iPod. The
thought that we shared interests made me smile and more comfortable with the
decision to leave with him.
Dylan said
he found a hotel about ten miles away so he waited a few minutes to sober up
and then we got back on the Interstate.
The music
provided a nice filler too of what didn’t need to be said. Sometimes, most of
the time, I think people talk too much. I enjoyed the silence and appreciated
it for what it was.
Eric and
Mercedes always talked. I couldn’t go anywhere without either of them talking
my ear off. After a while I got good at tuning them out but now I understood
what I had been missing out on—the silence and not having to tune anyone out.
Before long, and
feeling the effects of the few shots of whiskey I had, I fell asleep with my
face pressed to the window and Dylan’s sweatshirt as a pillow.
5.
Leaving – Dylan Wade
When I left home, I
intended to leave alone. I wasn’t running from anything, but I never planned to
stay in Olympia.
I knew I would leave.
That much had been planned.
My life there had
nothing to offer me other than another trip to jail.
Why I left?
Well, that was a long
time coming.
I didn’t have any
epiphany or anything. I wasn’t expecting to. After Drew, my older brother,
left, I didn’t want to be there any longer and there was nothing holding me
there.
It took me some time to
decide that I was really leaving as I had a full scholarship to Juilliard for
my music but I wasn’t going.
That life wasn’t for me
and it pissed me off that Landon’s mom had applied for me.
Graduation day wasn’t
exactly the day I had planned to leave either but that morning, seeing my dad
drunk again, I decided enough was enough. For a man that watched his wife die
at the hands of what that very bottle did, he was a piece of shit with
absolutely no self-respect.
I for one wouldn’t
stand to be subjected to his constant fucking mood swings and abuse. I’m not
saying he was abusive in the sense that I was hit regularly but when he punched
me at the school; it wasn’t the first time he’d laid a hand on me. For eight
years, I took it. Now, I wouldn’t any longer. I understood why Drew left when
he did. I only wished he had taken me with him. But then again there was
Bailey, and something about her forced me to stay.
Now that I had left, I
would be happy never speaking to my dad again or talking about him. I didn’t
have any emotional anger issues that resulted from it nor did I think about it.
What I thought about was who blames a ten-year-old for the death of his mother?
Ken Wade did.
Who blames a
fourteen-year-old for his brother running away?
Ken Wade did.
It wasn’t my fault. I
wasn’t there. I wasn’t driving the car that crossed the center line. But I knew
who it was and that didn’t sit well with me at all and essentially was another reason
why I left.
I was heartbroken when
my mom was taken from me. She was everything to me in my world. She was more
than a mother, she was my friend. I had no idea how to react to it but I also
wasn’t given a chance to. I was forced to act like it didn’t happen. For that
reason, I did what most kids would do at ten. I acted out. I expressed myself
in ways that got me in trouble, which in turn caused more tension between me
and Ken.